Tackling the Backlog

By Hugh MacIntosh, Natural History Data Steward

Faster Cataloguing with Custom Software

BEFORE:

A collection of shells in the invertebrate zoology backlog. While the specimens are in no immediate danger, this is not how we would like to store or organize them long term. Fortunately, the specimens have good associated data and can be processed in bulk.

AFTER:

Part of the same series of shells after cataloguing, labelling and careful packaging. These specimens are ready to be filed in their proper places on the collection shelves and will last for hundreds of years.

The Royal BC Museum acquires tens of thousands of objects every year. Some are collected through the work of our curators, some are sent to us by external researchers and some are graciously donated by community members. All new acquisitions are appreciated, as they help tell the story of BC’s environment and history. Once at the museum they can be cared for and stored for future generations. But arriving at the museum is only the first step. Before they are ready to be stored or put on display, they need to be assigned a unique catalogue number, added to our electronic database, labelled and packaged.

Small donations can often be processed quickly, but some acquisitions include hundreds or thousands of items—the result of a busy field season or the life’s work of a passionate collector. Even once they are accessioned (officially added to the collection), it may be some time before they are fully processed.

This is the dirty secret of many museum collections: the backlog. Everything in the backlog eventually gets processed; it just takes time—sometimes years. But what happens when the museum needs to move to the new Collections and Research Building in a few years? That’s when the task of tackling our backlog becomes urgent.

Cataloguing specimens in our database is time-consuming work, and it’s often hard to get a good flow going. Each item needs to be accurately described, and any associated information entered into one of hundreds of possible data fields. If an object is linked to others in the collection, these links also need to be described. Just entering this information can quickly become a full-time job on top of all the other things a collection manager needs to take care of.

If we can process specimens in bulk, we can accomplish the task in a fraction of the time. Fortunately for us, many large donations now arrive with all their associated data in a digital format, like an Excel spreadsheet. Some brilliant minds on our Digital team have developed special software that can help turn these spreadsheets into records in our own database.

The key is making them speak the same language. Think how you might organize a table of data about a butterfly collection. You’ll probably have a column for the species name, one for where it was collected, one for the date, one for any notes you may have, and so on. But what you might call “species name,” our database stores as “ScientificName.” After we do a little bit of formatting, checking for spelling mistakes or inconsistencies and moving data to the properly named columns, our software is ready to work its magic. Just to be sure, we import the data into a separate test version of our database so we can check that everything worked properly. If there are no issues, then we import it all to the real database. What would have taken weeks or months is accomplished in a matter of minutes!

In the last two years, we have been able to process over 92,000 items using this bulk import tool. With a move on the horizon, getting the backlog processed is suddenly looking a lot more manageable.